


keep smoking, i love you

by illinois_e



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, Pining, Post-Canon, Post-Time Skip, Smoking, actually, no beta we etc etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:34:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25832125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illinois_e/pseuds/illinois_e
Summary: kageyama likes boys that smell like menthols and moonlight and kunimi akira.
Relationships: Kageyama Tobio/Kunimi Akira
Comments: 6
Kudos: 53





	keep smoking, i love you

**Author's Note:**

> i've been suffering from severe kunikage fever since yesterday night so i wrote this hoping i'll be back to normal tomorrow
> 
> (on another note: how do y'all come up with tag ideas? my mind simply goes blank when i need it the most)

There’s a spotlight illuminating the stage, the scenery, the dancers. There’s a human shaped energy Tobio recognizes, from peeking through his middle school clubroom’s door crack, wrists curling as he tells a story with his body, Kunimi Akira’s legs keeping him above the ground as he spins in a wide, empty room, eyes closed as he learns how to fly.

His face is huge in the poster fixed to the theater and Tobio can’t help but buy a ticket, to watch, unknown, now that he’s twenty-four at the same way he did when he was thirteen. By then Kunimi wore his hair parted in the middle. By then Tobio was a king whose subjects had started to rebel against him, one by one.

Everything is turquoise blue, Aoba Johsai: a spectacle under the sea. Kunimi flies as he learned to, before, breaking through the water; bends his knees for a tour jetè the same way he did before jumping to spike, lazy and birdlike. For a second, it is as if gravity forgot to pull him down. As if it told him to stay in the air, where he belongs.

Tobio waits for him at the backdoor, after, eyes skimming through the faces that leave, happy faces, cheerful faces, focused faces, every person with a story and a sorrow of their own. He taps his foot on the floor, once twice, before stopping himself. Tobio is not a king anymore, no more than a boy lost in a country that he has not bothered to make known.

When Kunimi leaves, the last of them, Tobio opens his mouth and finds it empty. He’s fourteen years old and Kindaichi found him watching Kunimi through the window, and then Kunimi found him, and then he fled. He’s thirteen and a despot, and Kunimi is twenty three in winter, his body lean and flowing, as if he’s dancing even when he’s not.

“Kageyama,” he says, and his voice, Tobio thinks, has the beginnings of a rasp. He’s not surprised when Kunimi fishes for a pack of cigarettes in his back pocket, putting one in his mouth with the nimbleness of a routine move. “Fancy seeing you here.”

The tip of the cigarette shines brightly when Kunimi lights it, his small, personal sun. Tobio had never smoked, so he doesn’t have a formed opinion about menthols, even though people are always telling him they taste like shit. He thinks it fits Kunimi, somehow, the pungent smell of it, the way it burns your throat as it cools you down.

“I play here,” he says, even though Kunimi must know that, must have read one of the hundred articles about his transfer, must have seen his face in the covers of so many magazines he couldn’t stand the thought of him anymore.

Kunimi smiles. He feels like a sword sharpened until it becomes a sliver of light, all of him an edge. “I know that. I was talking about the theatre.”

“I saw your face on the poster.” I couldn’t help but want to see you again. I couldn’t help but long for a crumb of things and people familiar to me. “I didn’t know you danced. Professionally.”

“I don’t think you know much about me, Kageyama.”

It’s true. Kunimi always told the truth, never fled from it, like when he told the coach no one could stand to play with Tobio anymore, that he was going to take them down, like he did. And that’s how Tobio asks him for a coffee, and that’s how Kunimi, loose-limbed and limb loosener, accepts.

✸

The first thing he thinks when he’s talking Kunimi’s shirt off, apart from the fact that he’s taking Kunimi Akira’s shirt off in his bedroom, is that he has a snake tattoo on his back, and he would’ve never pegged Kunimi as the kind of guy to get a tattoo, but it’s purple and feral and beautiful, and like the menthols, fits him in a way Tobio can’t pinpoint yet.

He leaves a kiss on a scale, then another on the next one, his tongue sweeping out to taste the poison that seeps from Kunimi’s skin until Kunimi is painting under him, until he gets tired of this game called display of affection from a boy to whom he’s supposed to feel only mild annoyance, and inverts their positions, settling himself between Tobio’s thighs.

He grazes his nails down, following the path the light coming from the window carves on Tobio’s chest, and he puts too much force, and it hurts, but it doesn’t, not when Tobio’s fingers hurt all the time from tossing a ball to the edge of the world and catching it back, and Kunimi’s body, like his snake, is purple from jumping and falling down and picking himself up and jumping and falling down again. It doesn’t hurt, even when Tobio shudders, his skin burning red as Kunimi bends his neck to kiss him better, as he keeps kissing him until he reaches his belt.

It doesn’t hurt when Kunimi enters him, the snake coiling around their bodies, squeezing until there’s no air between them, until their bones crack and they crumble inside one another. Tobio bites Kunimi’s bottom lip until it bleeds, so he can suck out a drop of blood that will stay forever inside him, lost inside his veins, like a child that swallows a small toy so as to never be parted from it.

Tobio thinks he won't ever be alright, again.

✸

After—Tobio categorizes big moments in his life by _after, before_ and he throws being fucked in the ass by Kunimi Akira at the year of our lord 2021 in the bunch, before he can even think about it—Kunimi sits by the windowsill, quiet. Kunimi has always been quiet. Tobio thinks he picked up dance for the possibility of talking with your mouth closed, for saying with no words or sound. Dance is a monologue, or a soliloquy. Dance is about Kunimi and no one else.

He’s going through the menthols like a child goes through a bag of sweets, like he knows he can open up his hand and some adult is gonna fill it again and again and again, like it’ll never end; like he’ll never end.

Tobio wonders how long until he feels it in his lungs too, the smoke, how long until he finds himself without air in the middle of a jump, drowning within the clouds. He wonders if they’ll find it in his urine when he gets tested, and he’ll have to say he had a one night stand with a smoker non-friend who he had last seen at the bleachers in the 2018 MSBY Black Jackals x Schweiden Adlers game, when he lost to Hinata Shouyou.

He has a feeling Kunimi wouldn’t want him to tell anyone.

Tobio winces when he sits up, knees folded under him, and it’s strange to have his legs back without Kunimi between them. It feels strange already, even if it was just ten minutes ago. He doesn’t want to think about what he’ll feel like tomorrow.

“So,” he says, because it’s been fifteen years, give or take, and he still hasn’t learned how to start a conversation. “What are you doing here?”

Kunimi laughs, and it’s like falling into a black hole, or ten feet beneath the ground. It’s like everything he had not learned to say with a word. “Having sex with you. Or so I thought. You don’t look very sure.”

Tobio sighs, runs a hand through his hair while thinking about Kunimi’s hair intertwined in his fingers, that strands that fell when he pulled them, black as the night or the shadow of a smile. “In Italy.”

“Oh. Yes, about that.” About that, Kunimi says, and then he says nothing for a while, breathing nicotine inside his lungs, releasing smoke and maybe something else alongside it, sometime he doesn’t bother to tell Tobio about. He’s still naked, and so is Tobio, who thinks that maybe he should’ve kept his mouth shut so that Kunimi would come back for a repeat. “It’s nothing fancy, it’s just— well, I got into this dance company, some time after finishing college. They saw a coreo I posted on the internet and called me. I was working in a bank at the time, so it was a no brainer.”

Tobio nods, but Kunimi doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look anywhere else other than the night sky, the stars hidden by the pollution from factories and gasoline cars and cigarettes. So he lights another one. “It’s a nice choreo, I think. And so did they. But I wasn’t feeling well when I started it and I wasn’t feeling well when I finished it. And it was intense, you know, like something that’s eating you up from the inside, like you can’t think about anything else, and I was trying to… to put that into predefined stances of movements, trying to make it solid and real. But when I finished the intensity was just _gone_ , and now I dance it and I think it isn’t me, I think it never was me, not even in the beginning.” Oh, he’s rambling, Tobio notices, a second later, like his question was a key who turned open the gates of Kunimi’s lips, like it had been lost in his hand all this time. “And I’m trying to figure out what to do now, because they called me for it and they loved it and I love it, too, or at least I think I did, once. And I can’t dance it the same way as before, when I believed in it, but I think, I don’t know, maybe there’s a different form that the intensity takes, now.”

If Tobio were Hinata, or Sugawara, who are both boys that he fell in love with, in his first year of high school and in his last, he would know that right thing to say, what to do, would know when it’s best to raise your voice and be seen or when to keep your thoughts to yourself. But he isn’t Hinata nor Sugawara, and Kunimi is different from them, is made of another substance, like helium to mercury, like a sole moth between butterflies. 

So he doesn’t say anything. Kunimi turns back to look at him, looking strikingly nonchalant for someone who unpromptedly bore his heart out to the boy he hated the most in middle school. “And you didn’t wanna hear any of that.”

“No. I mean— yes. I don’t mind.” He says, and then shakes his head because it sounded stupid, and maybe he should, like Kunimi, learn how to talk assigning symbols to the movements of his limbs. But he had never shown an interest in dancing, or anything besides volleyball, and now he thinks it’s too late to even begin about doing something else.

He should ask Kunimi’s number but he doesn’t, while Kunimi fishes out pieces of clothing from the floor and puts them back on, because he doesn’t think Kunimi will appreciate, and he doesn’t think he’ll get a number, and he too wants to look strikingly nonchalant while he looks down to the white foam in a whirlpool, warming his hands before jumping in.

“It was nice.” Kunimi smiles, again, still sharp and still dark and still wrong. Though Tobio doesn’t think himself in the right to tell Kunimi Akira what is wrong and what isn’t anymore.

So he says, “It’s late. You can sleep here, if you want.”

And Kunimi says, “No, it’s fine. I’ll call a cab.” And he leaves, and Tobio has nothing to remember him by except the ache between his legs and the stench of menthol that clings to his walls like vice.

✸

He’s standing at the theater’s backdoor a week later, and it’s snowing this time, and he has his gloved hand closed into a fist. When Kunimi’s eyes find him, he opens his hands and shows the silver necklace, crux pendant swinging left and right with the motion, hanging from his fingers. “You forgot this.”

“Oh,” Kunimi says, and it sounds fake, because Kunimi isn’t the type of person to forget personal belongings in the residence of guys he fucks once in a haze and he isn’t the type of person to say an oh that should’ve been written in italics. “Thanks. I was looking for that.”

Tobio hadn’t remembered taking that out, but then he had been so lost in running his hands by Kunimi’s sides he remembers very few of what wasn’t strictly related to it, but next morning when he found it on his bedside table he knew it was his, for Kunimi was the only boy he brought inside his room in two years of living abroad, the only one that was more than a quick blowjob in the bathroom of a party he’d been dragged to.

So when Kunimi is the one that invites him to coffee this time, a thank you gift from a boy who doesn’t know the magic of using letters like blocks to build words with meaning, Tobio is the one who accepts.

✸

There’s a piece of paper with Kunimi’s number scrawled on it, lost somewhere inside one of his drawers, but he never saves the contact, because that, according to Kunimi, shows commitment, and he doesn’t want that, and Tobio shouldn’t either, even though he does, even though he says nothing about it.

And thus Kunimi stays like a random combination of numbers because it’s easier, like a password, like something he can change whenever he wants to, like something he can get rid of when it becomes useless.

Tobio, however, would argue that he’s wrong, and that’s not easy when Kunimi enters his house, when Kunimi sprawls his body, lithe and panther-like on his bed, when Kunimi starts taking his clothes off still in the hallway, shirt in the kitchen and pants in the living room and underwear in the bathroom. It’s not easier with Kunimi’s legs bracketing him, telling him not to move, not when Kunimi grinds his hips down, riding him fast like a bike towards the end of everything, not when Kunimi kisses him, tasting of coffee and cigarettes and a shipwreck as seen underwater, drowning, dying.

It’s not easy, especially when Kunimi traces the imaginary outline of a snake on Tobio’s bicep, the companion to his own, or when he reaches for the packet kept over the bedside table, Camel Menthol Silver, for which he is the single user. Tobio always watches as Kunimi lights his cigarettes, the tip glowing red, and Tobio thinks that hell is the sun, burning forever at the center of things, and that heaven is a boy running fast to death’s open arms, dancing on his way down.

✸

When Tobio said to Kindaichi and Kunimi that they should play again sometime he didn’t mean playing who gets to fall in love first and who gets to fuck up everything first, and when his teammates tell him he needs to get laid they mean a pretty girl in a party with a dress that barely holds her breasts in place, not the quiet god of a boy you’ve known for fifteen years and who hated you for the the biggest chunk of them.

He doesn’t tell them anything, and Kunimi doesn’t tell his friends in the dance company anything, and they agree to be each other’s best kept secret, soft and hid, and Tobio doesn’t want to be a secret but he thinks he can manage, because Kunimi has an appointment in a tattoo artist next week for a poem to be written in the pale light of his ribcage, and Tobio thinks about the design of a snake, colored chocolate mint. And because Kunimi stopped smoking inside the bedroom as soon as Tobio started to cough more often; and now sits naked by the living room balcony, the bane of all Tobio’s neighbours, the cross on his chest reflecting moonlight.

✸

“You’ve been watching all this time?” Kunimi asks, twelve years old and facial features schooled into stone. Tobio thinks he’s angry, but he can’t know. Kunimi won’t let him know. So he nods, the words locked inside his throat, unwilling to leave, unwilling to be ripped apart by Kunimi’s teeth. 

“That’s so stupid,” he says, and Tobio agrees, wonder what he had to stick his head into something that doesn’t belong to him, and then remembers Kunimi spinning around the room, one foot in the floor and the other in the air, as if he was silver thread being unfurled by a god. “So… Do you think I’m good?”

“I think you’re amazing,” Tobio says.

✸

Kunimi had been addicted to cappuccino since arriving in Italy, maybe almost as cigarettes, and Tobio thinks it’s a sin, to drink coffee without chocolate to break the bitterness of it. He has his hands crossed over the table as he waits for Kunimi to finish.

He looks up, to the ceiling, and then down, where Kunimi’s hand is covering his, and he allows himself a small smile, for Kunimi’s is silver lightning and carefree, and in a country in which they are each other’s only reminder of a land left behind, it’s enough for the two of them.

**Author's Note:**

> both kunimi's monologue about his coreo and the line "hell is the sun, burning forever at the center of things" were taken from car seat headrest's song [high to death](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phzsalhqnE4) (which you absolutely should listen to), though i took some liberties with the monologue, as the original one was about paintings, and not dancing


End file.
